Great Discussion on Tagging and Decentralization

There’s an interesting discussion going on between Kevin Marks and Stowe Boyd about tagging and decentralization. It’s a very important discussion because it involves the issues behind how we’re going to tag things in the future (if at all).

It was started by Jeff Jarvis, who was imagining a Semantic Web service for restaurants: Made for the distributed world

Stowe Boyd responded by agreeing that people would want to have their own content (in this case restaurant reviews) located on their own site and not on other sites. He makes the point that it is unfavorable to have to link to a proprietary site to look up a tagspace (e.g. Technorati): Jeff Jarvis on Made For A Distributed World

Kevin Marks responds by saying that tagging isn’t as proprietary as Stowe thinks it is, and that the freedom of being able to change tags over time makes it non-lock in: Understanding true decentralisation – the microformat model

Stowe responds by pointing out that people won’t change their tags over time, and that right now we need to link to some tagspace and so at some level it is lock-in: Kevin Marks on Tag Decentralization

I highly recommend reading this stuff if you’re interested in tagging/decentralization. I learned a lot from it…

Update: Marc Canter adds his take on the discussion, pointing out that the goal is to structure microcontent, and that the microformats way of doing things is only one of the possibilities.